Letters to the Editor
Anarcissie
Published Letters: 17
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What is the big deal?
[Read the article: The rubes and the elites]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't understand the flap about "bitter". It has been a staple of American political and cultural discourse for decades that there are a lot of bitter, angry Americans out in the less prestigious and glamorous parts of the country. Remember "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" and the famous Angry White Man? It has been talked up and down, left, right and middle. So what is the big deal now? We're talking about class. Class is a fact. Mr. Obama is at least willing to talk about the problem. The Clintons are apparently too cheesy, too busy triangulating. But it's still a tempest in a teapot.
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Blumenthal's Analysis Implodes
[Read the article: The GOP on the verge of imploding]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A logic in which "Republican" is freely confused with "conservative", "right-wing", and so forth, and "Democrat" with "liberal", "progressive", and "Left" is pretty hopeless as far as political philosophy goes. Fortunately, we can dispense with with this fluff, as only five or ten percent of the electorate vote on such abstractions as ideology, broad-scale policy, or character. The overwhelming majority vote for perceived immediate self-interest, tribal affiliation, image, emotion, or even because of the weather or the success or failure of their favortie teams in sports. That being the case, McCain, the old White guy, is virtually a shoo-in this year, because most Americans feel that the attributes of the presidency require oldness, Whiteness, and guyness.
In this the folk being pretty rational. While different candidates and parties put forward dogmas and slogans of very different styles, in fact there is little difference between them. The American ruling class are determined to run the world for as long as possible; therefore, we will continue to have foreign military operations like the twenty or thirty we have observed since World War II. They are impatient with monetary policy, therefore we will have more bubbles and bubble-inspired crises. They are okay with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Things are not going to change much, although the rhetoric used to justify the policies and activities of the ruling class may change. So one might as well vote on the image, because that's all the common voter will get anyway.
There is no reason in the present situation, then, for the Republican Party to "implode". There is no depression, civil war does not loom, the foreign wars are small and far away, the fanatics of the Religious Right have quiesced for the moment, and ecological breakdown is at least a few years off. Im Westen nicht neues.
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Nixon revived
[Read the article: Obama is wrong about the gas tax]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Obviously, if you have more money seeking the same amount of goods, the price of the goods will rise. Who will get the money? Obviously, the people who are holding and selling the goods.
Even the average six-year-old can probably understand this. Clinton (copying McCain) seems to be seeking the five-year-old vote -- people who are too dumb to follow the simplest economic logic.
It's a move like attempting to racialize the primaries. I'm beginning to think Nixon has come back from the dead.
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Time for a little class?
[Read the article: What should Hillary Clinton do now?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't think Clinton has done as much harm to the Democratic Party as she has to her reputation and prospects. All the right-wing beating on race and class resentment, the Southern strategy lite, is not going to play well back here in New York. So one thing she might do is not quit the race but forget about the knuckle-dragger stuff and go back to advocating herself as a representative of the policies she is supposed to believe in. Start the long march back to respectability.
After all, we may be observing one of those moments when the Zeitgeist shifts. Since 1980, and maybe before, dumb-thuggery and good-ol-boyness have been in the saddle, but the people may be sick of the routine, especially seeing what it has led to. What if learning, reason and intelligence suddenly come back in fashion? Clinton best be ready.
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Reagan, the Republican who was a Democrat
[Read the article: Why Ronald Reagan didn't completely suck]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Essentially, Reagan "Democratified" the Republican Party. The iconic Democrats of the Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy era were optimistic, big-spender fans of war and imperialism, whereas the Republicans tended towards paranoia, isolationism, tight budgets and hard money. For most of that era, the Bible-beaters and snake-handlers, as well as blatant Southern racists, were on the Democrats' plantation. Nixon began the transformation of the Republican Party, but his personal failings laid him low, and it was up to Reagan to finish the work and triumph. Under Reagan, Republican government learned to be a big daddy who knew how to throw money around, took over and extended the vast imperial project started by Truman and Acheson, and sucked in the backwoods fundamentalists (without giving them anything), leaving the real Democrats nothing but the ever unhappy and resentful Negroes, intellectuals, big-city hipsters and the State of Vermont. (There had to be some kind of outgroups for Reagan's tribalistic working-class followers to define themselves against.)
Of course every victory has within it the seeds of its own destruction. Reagan's and the Republicans' historical nemesis is George W. Bush, who took Reagan's "ideas" -- better call them instincts -- and drove them all over the cliff. But that's another story.
You traditional Democrats -- when you look at Reagan, you should say, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
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The profound error in all this stuff....
[Read the article: Have we fallen behind our parents?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]is that you all are "middle class." If you have to work, do a job, suffer employment for a living you are not middle class, you are working class -- people who live by selling their labor.
If you people would stop deluding yourselves about what you are and what you do, and wake up, you might have a chance of doing something about it.